ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 637

Think religion makes society less violent? Think again. (Op-Ed)

A city employee removes wooden crosses that were placed in a plaza by organizations protesting against the government inaction over the alarming murder rate in San Salvador, El Salvador, on Sept. 1. (Salvador Melendez / Associated Press)

By Phil Zuckerman

If it were true that when belief in God weakens, societal well-being diminishes, then we should see abundant evidence for this. But we don’t. In fact, we find just the opposite: Those societies today that are the most religious — where faith in God is strong and religious participation is high — tend to have the highest violent crime rates, while those societies in which faith and church attendance are the weakest — the most secular societies — tend to have the lowest.

We can start at the international level. The most secular societies today include Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Czech Republic, Estonia, Japan, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Germany, South Korea, New Zealand, Australia, Vietnam, Hungary, China and Belgium. The most religious societies include Nigeria, Uganda, the Philippines, Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Colombia, Senegal, Malawi, Indonesia, Brazil, Peru, Jordan, Algeria, Ghana, Venezuela, Mexico and Sierra Leone.

It is the highly secularized countries that tend to fare the best in terms of crime rates, prosperity, equality, freedom, democracy, women’s rights, human rights, educational attainment and life expectancy. (Although there are exceptions, such as Vietnam and China, which have famously poor human rights records.) And those nations with the highest rates of religiosity tend to be the most problem-ridden in terms of high violent crime rates, high infant mortality rates, high poverty rates and high rates of corruption.

Take homicide. According to the United Nations’ 2011 Global Study on Homicide, of the 10 nations with the highest homicide rates, all are very religious, and many — such as Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador and Brazil — are among the most theistic nations in the world. Of the nations with the lowest homicide rates, nearly all are very secular, with seven ranking among the least theistic nations, such as Sweden, Japan, Norway and the Netherlands.

Now consider the flip side: peacefulness. According to the nonprofit organization Vision of Humanity, which publishes an annual Global Peace Index, each of the 10 safest and most peaceful nations in the world is also among the most secular, least God-believing in the world. Most of the least safe and peaceful nations, conversely, are extremely religious.

As professor Stephen Law of the University of London observed: “If a decline in religiosity were the primary cause [of social ills], then we would expect those countries that have seen the greatest decline to have the most serious problems. But that is not the case.”

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The Republican Party’s religion problem, in 2 charts

By Aaron Blake

Religiously unaffiliated Americans are fast becoming a bigger force in American politics, while a not-very-religious senator continues to compete unexpectedly for the Democratic nomination.

 

As The Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey wrote a while back, a Pew study shows those who claim to be religiously “unaffiliated” had increased from 16.1 percent of Americans in 2007 to 22.8 percent today — the fastest-rising group.

And we here on The Fix noted recently that religious unaffiliateds — which includes atheists and agnostics, but also those who might be religious but don’t belong to a specific church — are now actually the biggest religious demographic in the Democratic Party.

(They remain considerably less a force in the GOP, but still have increased from 10 percent to 14 percent since 2007.)

All of this, of course, comes just more than a decade after so-called “values voters” in 2004 were supposed to have tipped the scales in favor of reelecting George W. Bush as president. Since then, social conservatism and religion have remained a driving force in the Republicans Party, in particular, but clearly not like they once did.

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Turkey’s Atheism Association starts petition for ‘equal treatment’ before law and in society

Turkey’s Atheism Association started a petition at change.org to ensure “equal treatment” of atheists before the law and among members of society, Turkish news website Bianet has reported.

The campaign, which aims to collect 5,000 signatures, was organized to make sure atheists’ demands for equal citizenship, both legally and in practice, were heard by the Turkish parliament.

The petition lists a variety of demands by the association to eliminate discrimination against atheists.

“We want politicians to restrain themselves when tempted to make discriminatory statements starting with ‘even the atheists,’” it said, referring to comparisons where atheists are used as negative examples.

The association asked for the legal recognition of atheism and measures against the use of the words “nonbeliever” and “atheist” as insults.

“We want equal treatment before the law. We do not want to be treated as though we have ‘insulted religious values’ when we express our faithlessness,” the petition said.

The statement argued that the religious pressures Turkish citizens faced were a violation of the International Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, citing specifically the rhetoric of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) that insistently defines Turkey as a country of a “single religion.”

The removal of the religious affiliation section from Turkish identity cards and ending the practice of registering children as “Muslim” at birth before they are able to reach a decision independently were also among their demands.

Finally, the association wanted to be represented in meetings with Turkey’s non-Muslim communities, which are currently restricted to religious minorities like Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians.

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China’s Bold Push into Genetically Customized Animals

China’s western Shaanxi Province is known for rugged windswept terrain and its coal and wool, but not necessarily its science. Yet at the Shaanxi Provincial Engineering and Technology Research Center for Shaanbei Cashmere Goats, scientists have just created a new kind of goat, with bigger muscles and longer hair than normal. The goats were made not by breeding but by directly manipulating animal DNA—a sign of how rapidly China has embraced a global gene-changing revolution.

Geneticist Lei Qu wants to increase goatherd incomes by boosting how much meat and wool each animal produces. For years research projects at his lab in Yulin, a former garrison town along the Great Wall, stumbled along, Qu’s colleagues say. “The results were not so obvious, although we had worked so many years,” his research assistant, Haijing Zhu, wrote in an e-mail.

That changed when the researched adopted the new gene-customizing technology called CRISPR–Cas9, a technique developed in the U.S. about three years ago. CRISPR uses enzymes to precisely locate and snip out segments of DNA, much like a word-processor finding and deleting a given phrase—a process known as “gene-editing.” Although it is not the first tool scientists have used to tweak DNA, it is by far more precise and cheaper than past technologies. The apparent ease of this powerful method now raises both tantalizing possibilities and pressing ethical questions.

Once the goat team began to deploy CRISPR, their progress was rapid. In September Qu and 25 other collaborating scientists in China published the details of their research in Nature’s Scientific Reports. In early-stage goat embryos they had successfully deleted two genes that suppressed both hair and muscle growth. The result was 10 goat kids exhibiting both larger muscles and longer fur—designer livestock—that, so far, show no other abnormalities. “We believed gene-modified livestock will be commercialized after we demonstrate [that it] is safe,” predicts Qu, who envisions this work as a simple way to boost the sale of goat meat and cashmere sweaters from Shaanxi. [Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.]

The research is just one of a recent flurry of papers by Chinese scientists that describe CRISPR-modified goats, sheep, pigs, monkeys and dogs, among other mammals. In October, for instance, researchers from the country discussed their work to create unusually muscled beagles in the Journal of Molecular Cell Biology. Such research has been supported via grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Ministry of Agriculture, Ministry of Science and Technology as well as provincial governments.

Dozens, if not hundreds, of Chinese institutions in both research hubs like Beijing and far-flung provincial outposts have enthusiastically deployed CRISPR. “It’s a priority area for the Chinese Academy of Sciences,” says Minhua Hu, a geneticist at the Guangzhou General Pharmaceutical Research Institute and one of the beagle researchers. A colleague, Liangxue Lai of the Guangzhou Institutes of Biomedicine and Health, adds that “China’s government has allocated a lot of financial support in genetically modified animals in both [the] agriculture field [and the] biomedicine field.”

This is raising a number of ethical worries about making new life forms. Unlike past gene therapies, changes made using CRISPR to zygotes or embryos can become “permanent”—that is, they are made to the DNA that will be passed onto future generations. For each zygote or embryo that scientists successfully transform, typically dozens, if not hundreds, of others do not work. But the technology is rapidly improving. “What is different about CRISPR is that the technology is vastly more efficient and so the possibility of it being practiced widely is that much more real,” says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Harvard Medical School. Past efforts to manipulate the genetic code of life have been slower, more cumbersome and more unpredictable. “The ethical concerns are now upon us because the technology is real,” he adds.

This applies to CRISPR experiments to “edit” the DNA of all plants and animals—as well as in the future, perhaps, humans, if scientists like Qu further hone the technique. Unlike past gene therapies, changes made using CRISPR to zygotes or embryos become “permanent”; that is, they enter the germ line and will be passed onto future generations. “As with any intervention, there’s always a trade-off in issues between human welfare and animal welfare and gauging the environmental impacts,” says Daley, referring the quest for “improved” livestock, a current focus of China’s gene-editing research. And on the even more complicated topic of potential CRISPR experiments involving human DNA, he wonders, “Can we draw a clear line between what might be allowable for medical research or applications and what we must strictly prohibit?” Finding an answer that the whole world can agree on is geneticists’ and ethicists’ next big task.

China is not the birthplace of CRISPR (currently there’s an ongoing patent battle between scientists at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Berkeley, for that claim). China, however, has been an extremely rapid adopter, aided by a fast-growing research budget and the sheer shale of China’s science establishment, which is largely state-affiliated. Between 2008 and 2012 China’s research and development spending fully doubled, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Science, Technology and Industry Outlook 2014. (Now second in the world, China’s research budget may surpass the U.S. by 2019, the report projects.) Yet despite its strengths, “China is a relative newcomer to international scientific community and doesn’t have the same institutional-review traditions in place,” says Daley, adding that scientists in the U.S. and Europe are now keenly watching how Chinese scientists will deploy such powerful tools.

The level and sophistication of work in China using CRISPR is already “about the same” as in Europe and the U.S., where the technology was codeveloped, says George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School. An analysis by Thomson Innovation, a division of London-based Thomson Reuters, found that more than 50 Chinese research institutions have filed gene-editing patents.

Some experiments in China, as in the U.S. and U.K., are aimed at potential biomedical applications. For instance, scientists at Yunnan Key Laboratory of Primate Biomedical Research have used CRISPR to augment the neurological development of monkeys in an effort to test the feasibility of creating primate disease models for better understanding human conditions like autism, schizophrenia and Alzheimer’s disease. Many experiments, like the one on cashmere goats and a similar experiment that deleted the gene-inhibiting muscle growth in sheep, are aimed at transforming animal husbandry—more muscled livestock could help satiate China’s fast-growing middle-class appetite for meat.

But what first brought widespread global attention, or infamy, to China’s ambitions was a recent published experiment on human embryos, the first in the world. In April China became a lightning rod for criticism and anxiety when a team of Chinese scientists published a paper online in the journal Protein & Cell detailing attempts to use CRISPR to modify nonviable human embryos, obtained with consent from a fertility clinic. Their aim had been to delete a gene linked to a blood disorder called beta-thalassemia without creating other mutations, but the experiment failed on 85 attempted embryos.

The research was legal within China, which bans experiments on human embryos more than 14 days old, and was supported in part by government grants. (Such research is not banned in most U.S. states but is probably ineligible for federal funding.)

Many international observers reacted with sharp rebuke, attributing nefarious intentions to the Chinese scientists. “No researcher has the moral warrant to flout the globally widespread policy agreement against altering the human germ line,” Marcy Darnovsky, executive director of the California-based Center for Genetics and Society, a nonprofit advocacy group, wrote in a statement reacting to the report. Respected news organizations ran ominous headlines: “Chinese Scientists Edit Genes of Human Embryos, Raising Concerns” appeared in The New York Times and “Editing Humanity” in The Economist.

Because China is new to global scientific stage, its institutional standards for approving research projects are not fully transparent to the world, Daley says. Moreover, the researchers involved were not the heads of well-known global institutions, like the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard University or the Francis Crick Institute in London, whom global research community knows well and understands their motivations. Daley adds that now China’s scientific establishment is “responsibly stepping up to discussion.”

The controversy may have been a bit overblown. The Chinese scientists say they were not trying to edit human germ line or develop clinical uses. Junjiu Huang, co-author of the paper and a geneticist at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, wrote in an e-mail to Scientific American that “It is forbid[den] to do germ-line editing in clinic.” Yet he defended the potential to learn about human disease s through future CRISPR experiments. “Using CRISPR–Cas9 technology, scientists could learn more about what are the real functions of key genes in [the] human preimplantation period. … We can also figure out the mechanism of gene repairing, which could lead to a new understanding of how genetic diseases occur during early development.”

Later appraisals credit the carefulness of their method, including the choice to deliberately use nonviable embryos that could never become babies, Harvard’s Church says. But the flap itself pointed to both the seriousness of the stakes and concern over whether Chinese scientists will accept same ethical principles as Westerners.

In early December scientists from the U.S., U.K. and China will meet at the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., in an effort to codify international consensus on editing DNA, focusing on the human germ line. Church, who has participated in preliminary meetings with Chinese and U.S. counterparts, says that the important takeaway from these debates may not be that China is an ethical outlier but rather that public discussion and clarification of guidelines, especially regarding the human germ line, is dearly needed. “I think China is behaving just as responsibly as others. I would not characterize China as being problematic in any way. Chinese scientists worked well within the legal system of most countries but I think there might have been some misunderstandings about consensus at that time,” he says. “I think it’s important to talk about it. I think many people want every opportunity to discuss this issue—sometimes you need an event to make it newsworthy.”

 

Although scientists today offer a range of views on what is acceptable, the essential divide may not be between East and West. In September a researcher at the London-based Francis Crick Institute, Kathy Niakan, filed an application with U.K. regulators “to use new [CRISPR] ‘genome editing’ techniques on human embryos,” according to an institution statement. “The work carried out at the Crick will be for research purposes and will not have a clinical application. However, the knowledge acquired from the research will be very important for understanding how a healthy human embryo develops.”

Meanwhile Chinese scientists point out that the country is having its own internal debates about the ethics of editing DNA.

Whatever the discussions in Washington yield, Yaofeng Zhao at the State Key Laboratory of Agrobiotechnology, a geneticist working on sheep, says that China is also grappling with its own internal ethical and safety debates about moving CRISPR experiments, for agriculture and biomedicine, beyond the lab. “I think there are different viewpoints on gene modification. Even in China there are different viewpoints on this issue. Some people in the general public, they are scared. But for most academics, I think most scientists support this kind of research—we need to do something for the future,” he says. In contrast to Qu, the cashmere-goat specialist, Zhao doesn’t think designer meat will be soon be on dinner plates. “If you want to use modified animals in agriculture, you must consider the public opinion—Can they accept this? Even if the technology is quite safe, it depends on many factors if you want to commercialize this kind of animal in agriculture.” There is already precedent for the Chinese government spending heavily on GMO crop research, including improved corn, wheat and rice, but delaying commercialization due to fierce public resistance.

In areas where science advances faster than regulation it may be possible for individual scientists or labs—in China or any country—to act outside of national consensus. At the Shenzhen International Biotech Leaders Summit on September 23, the private genomics firm BGI–Shenzhen, a maverick in the field, announced that it would begin selling gene-edited micro pigs as pets; the smaller pigs were originally created with the intention of biomedical research. Yong Li, technical director of BGI’s animal science platform, who turned down an interview request about the pigs for Scientific American, previously told Nature that he wanted to “evaluate the market.” (Pets are less regulated than agriculture, and do not supply national markets.) Some Chinese researchers clearly disapprove. Lai, co-author of the beagle paper, says he believes scientists should “not use CRISPR technique to create pets with special traits to satisfy some pet owner's special favor.”

Lai’s own work does not involve human embryos but he offered his opinion on the larger ongoing debate: If safety and efficacy issues can first be addressed, he is open to the future possibility of therapeutic uses, but not to eugenics. “In human beings CRISPR could be used to correct the mutation, which cause genetic human diseases, and it should not be used to generate any particular traits which some people may favor.” Other Chinese scientists working with CRISPR expressed similar views but none purported to predict the future—in China or elsewhere. Huang notes, “The gene-editing technology is very hot all over the world.”

Public debate over any powerful new technology reflects preexisting public hopes and fears, Church says. In the case of CRISPR that includes the desire to eliminate hereditary diseases as well as concerns about the commodification of parenting, the privileges of rich over poor and, newly, the rise of China.

Ex-Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Joann Sfar: Don’t pray, Paris is about life

Photo Credit: Instagram / Joann Sfar

By EDWARD B. COLBY

A French cartoonist has responded to the carnage in Paris with a cartoon asking his global friends not to pray for the City of Light — but instead to promote the message #ParisisaboutLife.

As news of the terror attacks spread Friday night, former Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Joann Sfar posted a drawing on Instagram that has provoked a debate.

To “friends from the whole world,” Sfar wrote, “thank you for #prayforParis, but we don’t need more religion! Our faith goes to music! Kisses! Life! Champagne and Joy! #ParisisaboutLife.”

Instragram user junimond111 called Sfar’s message “The most reasonable reaction on a most unreasonable day.”

“Thank you,” nabbyws wrote in French. “I don’t have the words, thank you.”

Others pushed back on Sfar’s message.

“Tell that to the people who just lost their loved ones,” responded melodious_p.

Lucian Vinatoriu, whose handle is lux_hussein, said “this is great! except that the hashtag is about showing compassion, not about religion. d’oh…!”

The Paris prosecutor said Saturday that 129 people were killed in Friday’s attacks at the Bataclan concert hall, Parisian cafes and near France’s national stadium. Three hundred and fifty-two were injured, with 99 in critical condition.

As of late Saturday afternoon Eastern time, Sfar’s post had generated more than 14,700 likes and more than 600 comments.

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The Genesis and Growth of Global Jihad

PHOTOGRAPH BY ELYXANDRO CEGARRA/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY IMAGES

BY ROBIN WRIGHT

The jihad by Muslim extremists against the West began at 1:05 P.M. on April 18, 1983, when a dark delivery van made a sharp left turn onto the cobblestone drive of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut. Instead of parking, the van—laden with explosives—accelerated, and rammed into the entrance. The explosion echoed across the city. Black smoke enveloped the Embassy, a seven-story complex that overlooked the Mediterranean. When the smoke cleared, the front of the building was exposed, like the open face of a doll’s house, with bits of furniture and bodies thrown across the floors and onto the coastal boulevard beyond. More than sixty people were killed; many more were wounded. My office was just up the hill, behind the Embassy.

The jihad has mutated ever since; the groups have multiplied. The disparate wings now hold notorious records: in two separate bombings in Beirut, in 1983, the largest loss of U.S. military personnel in a single incident since Iwo Jima, and the largest loss of C.I.A. operatives ever. In 2001, in the United States, the deadliest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor. In Madrid, in 2004, the deadliest terrorist attack ever in Europe, after multiple bombs went off on rush-hour trains. And in Paris on Friday, the deadliest attack in France since the Second World War. The jihad’s many tentacles have now terrorized Western targets on six continents.

The terror didn’t start in Beirut, of course. The world had already witnessed the simultaneous hijacking of American, British, and Swiss planes by Black September, in 1970; the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; and the 1975 kidnapping of eleven OPEC ministers, by Carlos the Jackal, in Vienna. They’re recorded on the National Counterterrorism Center’s timeline of major incidents since the emergence of terrorism as a popular form of modern warfare, in the seventies. Many terrorists had ties to the Middle East back then, too. But the acts were perpetrated by secular groups.

The ideological tide turned in 1979, with twin eruptions: the Iranian Revolution unleashed Islamic zealotry intent on ridding the region of Western (particularly American) influence. It appealed primarily to Shiites, including the young men who later formed Lebanon’s Hezbollah. The Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan provoked a region-wide backlash in the form of new mujahideen holy warriors. They were primarily Sunni, and included the young Saudi Osama bin Laden. In both, religion became the idiom of opposition, the mobilizer, the rallying cry. Religion was invoked to condone violence—even a takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Islam’s holiest site. Jihad was redefined.

The movement has grown exponentially with each decade. The eighties brought suicide bombings. The tactic, initiated by Hezbollah, was adopted and adapted by its brethren, notably in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Dawa (The Call), in Kuwait. But the groups had largely local and limited goals, such as confronting foreigners or seizing political space. Hezbollah’s attacks in Beirut in the early eighties sought to force American and French forces out of Lebanon. (They did.)

In the nineties, the jihadis went beyond their traditional turf, with Hezbollah’s attacks in Argentina and Al Qaeda’s first attack on the World Trade Center and its bombings of U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The pattern led the Harvard historian Samuel P. Huntington to pen his controversial 1996 book, “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.” The post-Cold War world was re-organizing around “societies sharing cultural affinities,” Huntington wrote. “The West’s universalist pretensions increasingly bring it into conflict with other civilizations.” The new fault lines, Huntington said, were largely between Muslims and non-Muslims.

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Question of the Week- Nov 18

The attacks on Paris are blamed in good part on alienated young Muslims born or raised in France and other European countries.How best can societies in Europe and the rest of the West combat these terrorists and the circumstances that helped produce them?

 

Our favorite answer will win a copy of “An Appetite for Wonder” by Richard Dawkins.

 

If you would like to submit a question (Questions only, please!), please send them to Camilla Sorensen at camilla.sorensen@richarddawkins.net

Firefighter Receives World’s Most Extensive Face Transplant

Health and Medicine





Photo credit:

Patrick Hardison, before (left) and after (right) the pioneering procedure. NYU Langone Medical Center.

A team of surgeons at New York University’s Langone Medical Center has carried out the world’s most extensive face transplant, with the medical school’s dean Robert Grossman calling the operation “a major milestone and [a] critically important contribution to the advancement of science and medicine,” as reported by the Guardian.

Quantum computers inch closer to reality thanks to entangled qubits in silicon

By Dario Borghino

Practical quantum computers are still years away, but lately the pace of research seems to have picked up. After building the basic blocks of a quantum computer in silicon and storing quantum information for up to 30 seconds, scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) have now violated a principle of classical physics to demo for the first time a pair of entangled, high-fidelity quantum bits (qubits) in silicon. The advance could help unleash the power of a new kind of computation that would affect everything from data cryptography to drug design, overnight deliveries and subatomic particle experiments.

A mathematical relationship known as Bell’s inequality places a limit on how strongly two particles can correlate without violating two intuitive principles that govern classical physics – locality, meaning what happens in one place can only be influenced by nearby objects; and realism, meaning physical objects exist whether or not they are observed.

But when two quantum particles commune, or entangle, their correlation can be strong enough to break this principle, giving rise to what Einstein famously dismissed as spooky action at a distance. While it is possible to achieve entanglement without violating the inequality, in the context of quantum computing a violation is desirable as it means qubit operations are more reliable and have access to more “spooky” – and useful – behavior for faster number-crunching.

Professor Andrea Morello and team have now, for the first time, demonstrated a violation of Bell’s inequality in silicon, paving the way for quantum computers that are reliable and highly scalable.

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Astronomers Spot Mysterious System 1600 Light-Years Away

Space





Photo credit:

Artist's conception of a binary brown dwarf system with an accretion disk. NASA/Gemini Observatory/ L. Cook

There is a peculiar system 1,600 light-years from our solar system. It is composed of two brown dwarfs, massive objects too big to be planets and too small to fuse hydrogen and become stars. But that is not the strange part: Scientists have now discovered a Venus-sized planet around the smaller brown dwarf.